The late Patricia Highsmith was not widely known as a ray of sunshine, yet for much of her life she was the recipient of fan mail from women saying she’d saved them from despair, suicide or simply a lonely, unfulfilling life. The reason for this was her novel Carol, initially […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
Who Wants to Kill Jessie (1966): Barbarella vs Superman in Communist Czechoslovakia!
A new Second Run disc is always an education, and this time it’s taught me what the genre term is for those strange, high-concept Czechoslovak comedies like Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself With Tea, or Happy End. In their native country, they’re called “crazy comedies”. That name might […]
Doctor Who A-Z #79: Revenge of the Cybermen (1975)
Revenge of the Cybermen is a real oddity. It’s not an oddity because it’s the only Tom Baker Cyberman story, or even because it’s the only 1970s Cyberman story, though these are the clearest symptoms of its true underlying strangeness. And it’s not odd simply because it’s a Patrick Troughton […]
Doctor Who A-Z #78: Genesis of the Daleks (1975)
Part of the fascination I have with things that run as long as Doctor Who has is that it repeats; to you, it might be mere repetition, to me it’s an endlessly fascinating series of variations that shapes the story. There may be, for instance, a parallel universe where only the nerdiest […]
Doctor Who A-Z #77: The Sontaran Experiment (1975)
In retrospect, it’s hard to believe anyone was ever nervous about Tom Baker taking over as the Doctor. At the time, though, Jon Pertwee was both the longest-running and most popular Doctor, so producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes came up with a number of strategies to ease […]
Outside the Blue Box: Claws (1987)
Looking back on the history of Doctor Who means looking back over the last sixty-plus years of British television. Along with a few other titans like Coronation Street and Blue Peter, it’s one of the few shows whose contemporaries can include anything from Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? to Adolescence. The fact […]
Doctor Who A-Z #76: The Ark in Space (1975)
With Tom Baker’s debut story, Robot, handled by Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks, this is the first story to be produced and script edited by the iconic team of Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes. The break feels sudden and immediate. Even the Troughton era was never this single-mindedly concerned with being […]
Doctor Who A-Z #75: Robot (1974-5)
Interviewed ahead of Peter Capaldi’s debut in Deep Breath, Steven Moffat said he’d already written his Spearhead from Space in The Eleventh Hour, so why not do Robot for the next Doctor? The comparison has to do with familiarity: Pertwee’s debut, like Smith’s, was a sudden, startling break with the […]
Doctor Who A-Z #74: Planet of the Spiders (1974)
I don’t know what I expected when I started this project – I don’t know if I was doing anything as vulgar as expecting something – but probably the last thing I was expecting was having my childhood love for the Third Doctor comprehensively reignited. And yet, despite a rocky final season, […]
Doctor Who A-Z #73: The Monster of Peladon (1974)
We’re at the penultimate serial of Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor, so it’s probably time to tackle the burning issue of his tenure head-on: is he a toff? The Third Doctor, his detractors say, is the establishment Doctor, “The Pompous Tory” in the words of seminal fan blog Adventures With the Wife […]